Ukrainian Servicemen

Yuriy Saveliev, age twenty-eight, received bullet wounds to the spine and is now partially paralyzed, requiring a long rehabilitation.

Photograph by Alexander Chekmenev

The Ukrainian photographer Alexander Chekmenev spent most of August at the Main Military Clinical Hospital, in Kiev, where he photographed dozens of men who were injured during the protracted conflict between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian authorities. They are mostly Ukrainian servicemen, Chekmenev told me, but some are members of volunteer battalions that offer the Army additional support. All were wounded in battles with pro-Russian separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Most people in Kiev feel safely removed from the fighting in the east, roughly five hundred miles away, Chekmenev said. But the injuries being treated at the military hospital speak volumes about the severity of the fighting. Many of the men have lost arms and legs, and the more extreme cases can expect to remain hospitalized for a year, he said. The conflict between Kiev and the separatists, now in its sixth month, has resulted in the deaths of at least twenty-two hundred Ukrainians, and recent reports suggest that more than a million have been displaced.